Hi guys,

This place is a great resource!

I'm the proud owner of a smooth running, awesome MSI eclipse x58/i7 950 Hac. It's running great, but it's running a bit hotter than it did in Windows, and I'm guessing this is due to Speedstepping.

I have the MSI board configured for HPET on, I'm running Snow 10.6.3 in 32bit mode.

Strangely, I had some problems with the processor to get it running with all 8 cores (4 physical/8 logical on the i7). I modded the DSDT to fix HPET, and remove the CPU aliases. Strangely, I seem to need a lot of kexts to get this processor to work on this board.

I'm using NullIntelCPUPowerManagement/Disabler/EvoSpeedStep/VoodooTSCSync kexts to get this cpu to boot cleanly without cpus=1. If I remove any of these kexts, I get a kernel panic on boot just after it lists the CPU cores - not a clean one either, just a hard crash (i.e no System Uptime message, just a hard line print stop. I should mention that without the TSCSync kext, it will boot occasionally, but respond ridiculously slow and laggy - unusable, like the CPU is working at 100% or something.

'About This Mac' reports a 3.08ghz Quad-core Xenon, and it thinks it's a MacPro4,1 model.

I'm using MSR tools to see if Speedstepping is working. I've attached a screenshot... What confuses me most is that it shows CPU0 and CPU1 but no more? Also, my processor is stuck at 100% - not fluctuating like I guess you'd expect.

I haven't modded the DSDT for speedstep, because that scares me a bit. I was wondering if anyone had an i7 950 DSDT with speedstep correctly configured?

So, long story short = if anyone has any help they can give me to check and enable speedstepping on a i7 950 on 10.6.3 I'd really appreciate it!

My DSDT aml is attached too in case anyone wants to take a look

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Best,

You need to be able to load AppleIntelCPUPowermanagement for native speedstep. NullIntelCPUPowerManagement/Disabler both do the same thing, disable AppleIntelCPUPowermanagement (you should only be using one if any). I would recommend you remove Disabler, you can temporarily allow appleintelcpupm to load with -AllowAppleCPUPM flag using NullIntelCPUPowerManagement while you debug.



SSDT's are used for cpu configuration. I recommend you do a linux dump, more on that here. Also, it is common practice to use an apple profile close to your build, you may also find that there.



Attachment is not placed inline.

Oops - fixed.. however, it's now out of date, as I found the EvoSpeedStep i7 MSI CST patch and applied that, so new DSDT is attached to this post

Click to view attachment

Thanks for you reply - I've now deleted those kexts - apart from EvoSpeedStep, and changed my smbios.plist to read iMac11,1

However, it seems now to be loading the speedstepping stuff ok, but I'm back to extreme lag/stuttering unless I use cpus=1

This is the same behaviour my hac exhibited before I attempted any kind of DSDT patching, speedstepping fix or anything. That is to say, everything is extremely laggy - even down to the spinning wheel on the boot screen. Booting with -v doesn't show much wrong, but it mostly won't get to the desktop, or if it does it's very, very laggy.

It mentions something about not loading com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_platform Plugin... I've attached photos of the boot process (sorry for the blurryness on some) - does anyone know why I have continued trouble with a laggy/slow/unbooting system if I don't boot with cpus=1 or this specific combination of kexts?

I should add that it doesn't kernel panic - the last entry you see on the last picture (the fakesmc info key not found line) is where it hangs or jumps to a black screen (and occasionally blue).

I'm going slightly bonkers with this, I'd be willing to pay for someone to remotely login and take a look

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Best,
D